Studies in Aegean Chronology.
by Paul Åström, L. R. Palmer & Leon Pomerance
Studies in Aegean Chronology
contains three independent papers by Professor Paul Åström, Professor L.R. Palmer and Leon Pomerance, F.S.A., for which the individual authors are alone responsible.Paul Åström shows in a chapter on the Middle Minoan chronology that we have hardly any reliable evidence at all for the absolute dating of the Middle Minoan phases.
Leon Pomerance contributes two chapters: "The Mythogenesis of Minoan Chronology” and “A Note on the Carved Stone Ewers from the Khyan Lid Deposit."
In the October 1983 issue of AJA, Vol.87 p. 512, in an article on chronological horizons of the Early and Middle Minoan datings, the statement is made based on consensus (?) "Briefly, the correlation of the alabaster lid of Khyan (apparently of the third quarter of the seventeenth century) with MM IIIA at Knossos is still sound .... Further on the same page. the Khyan Lid is listed as a principal synchronism.
Since 1908 when the restored basketweave ewer, one of two found with the Lid was first exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum, apparently no Aegean specialist could prove it was made in the 17th century on the argument of similar motifs in the MM III period, Evans had failed to find or identify this unusual motif in the National Museum in spite of two diligent searches for the comparable architectural piece from Clytemnestra’s Tomb. If it had been found, the dating would have been the 13th century and not the 17th century.
That the Khyan Lid, like most of the Egyptian artifacts found in Crete was "out of time context" is now recognizable because of the revolutionary change in the 15th century lapidaries’ approach to making these stone vases with the assembly of multiple accessories made individually.
It is this perspective that contradicts the "soundness" of a synchronism that never existed.
The most substantial part of the book is provided by Professor L.R. Palmer’s work The Linear B Palace at Knossos which was prompted by a younger colleague who confessed to finding the luxuriant literature stimulated by the "Knossos problem" over the last twenty-four years "an impenetrable jungle." Professor Palmer has attempted a survey which brings out the main issues and contrives a visual presentation of the evidence in the form of plans and sections with explanatory captions.
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